Just like old times, huh Fox? Hands on with Star Fox Zero

Star Fox has never been a series that I understood, some people love the games, but I want more open flight, not the on rails experience that it delivers, but with Star Fox Zero, my perceptions have change, if only a little.

The big thing to note with Star Fox Zero is that it uses the gamepad screen in a special way, the gamepad screen is your targeting computer and while it is possible, albeit very hard to aim using the TV, you can get through most of the fight without using the gamepad screen. The game starts out with a large canyon and open spaces, to help you adjust to the controls and the mechanics but then after has you fighting in a large circular space, which does need you to use the gamepad.

It took me some time to adjust to the new way of playing and once I did I was able to tackle the threats with a lot of ease. When you are using the gamepad, you can actually target in a direction differently to where you are flying, which is something that will come in handy. Moving is done with the stick and shooting with the ZR button, holding down the button will charge up your shot, allowing you to do more damage.

The R-Wing can also transform into a walker, allowing players to get down and fight on the ground, but the walker is not limited to that, it can actually hover in the air for a limited time, meaning you can do some impressive moves. Some enemies have weak points that are actually easier to hit when using a different vehicle mode, meaning changing up on the fly is something you will need to do. The same controls are here, but with the addition of the hover the gameplay changes quite a bit.

The final battle tasked me with taking down a large ship that was above the planet and there were two ways that it could be done, firstly you can fly around the outside and deal a lot of damage. In doing this, the camera will lock onto the target on the big screen, which means you will need to use the gamepad screen to target the towers and damage the ship. Here it is not possible to target on the TV, but you still need to keep looking at it in order to avoid flying into things.

The other way you can take on this battle is you can fly into the ship, swap to the walker mode and do a more traditional shooter approach to the combat. Here it was a lot more fast paced, I had to do more looking between the screens, which proved to be a lot of a challenge. When you are in the R-Wing, you can do rolls and twists, but when you are in the walker mode, it is a lot of jumps and flips to avoid damage. After taking quite a number of hits, I was able to defeat the boss and the level ended.

The issue that I have Star Fox is that it still seems restrictive, but that could be because of the demo I played, time will tell if it is different. It looks like Nintendo is finally trying to do something with the Gamepad, other than an inventory or map screen and I hope that it works for them, while not a massive Star Fox fan, I am excited to try more of Zero.

Luke travelled to E3 to cover it for his own site Maxi-Geek, he was nice enough to write this for us too.